Elgar Powers Up IVI Development
"Pacific MindWorks is very easy to work with and did what they said they would do-on
time and within budget," Steve Healy, Elgar Vice President of Engineering.
Elgar reached its position as a top provider of power supply instruments by adhering
to the old adage that says the customer is always right. This principal resulted
in Elgar acting quickly when a major customer requested IVI support in the upcoming
release of a next generation modular power supply.
Faced with an uncertain path to IVI success, Elgar knew to seek out the very best
in IVI expertise. "While we have substantial experience developing instrument drivers,"
said Steve Healy, Elgar's Vice President of Engineering, "IVI development was new
to the team. Fortunately we encountered Pacific MindWorks during an IVI Foundation
event. It was obvious the company had the extensive IVI experience we were looking
for."
On the Road to IVI
Elgar turned to Pacific MindWorks to jump start its IVI development efforts. "The
complexity of IVI would have been time consuming to overcome without the timely
assistance of Pacific MindWorks. After only a few discussions, Pacific MindWorks
presented us with a comprehensive IVI strategy that succinctly addressed current
and future needs. Pacific MindWorks would build the driver, provide training, deliver
a robust IVI development environment, and be available for consultation as needed."
"Since the hardware wasn't ready yet, Pacific MindWorks worked with a power supply
instrument that presented a reasonably similar interface. The project was scoped
at a short six calendar weeks. After two weeks Pacific MindWorks came back with
a detailed design for the driver. Their design hit the mark right from the beginning.
We received the first code drop at four weeks. It was surprisingly robust for a
first version. And, as promised, at six weeks, Pacific MindWorks delivered a fully
documented and virtually bug free IVI driver."
It was abundantly clear that Pacific MindWorks' driver development solution, Nimbus,
was a crucial part of the project's success. "Nimbus is incredibly powerful. It
neatly abstracts away the complexities of IVI development without sacrificing ease
of use. Seeing Nimbus in action was all it took to motivate a purchasing decision."
"Getting up to speed on Nimbus was simple. The tool is so intuitive that we only
needed a few hours of training to be able to modify the driver without assistance
to support other similar products. When the instrument hardware was ready, we used
Nimbus to extend the driver as appropriate. We were also pleased with the extensive
documentation Nimbus created. This benefit frees developers from the burden of keeping
driver documentation in sync with the code." Conveniently, Nimbus-generated help
files are viewable directly within Microsoft Visual Studio.
A Platform for the Future
Elgar found that the IVI driver Pacific MindWorks developed could serve as a solid
platform for the future. "We plan to use this driver as the reference model for
subsequent IVI development projects. With Nimbus, we can easily tailor the driver
to the unique requirements of our other instruments. Now we can develop an IVI driver
in far less time than ever imagined."
"The technical competence that Pacific MindWorks demonstrated at the beginning of
this project held through to the end," concluded Healy. "Pacific MindWorks is very
easy to work with and did what they said they would do-on time and within budget."